I MADE a bet in January this year that I’d clean my horrible stairs if humanity didn’t nuke itself by New Year’s 2025, and throughout the year, I remained pretty confident I’d never have to deliver. But it looks like I’m breaking out Henry Hoover.
 
How did it all go so wrong for my never-cleaning plan? In a year of catastrophic violence on the borders of Russia and across the Middle East, how have we escaped the terminus that is the mushroom cloud? There are four main reasons.
 
Firstly, the relative restraint of Iran, Russia and China. We can quibble about Russia, which has been the most aggressive of the three. For sure, Iran, though, has had casus belli to hit Israel fatally but has opted instead for demonstration strikes.

China, for its part, has not been drawn into a much-anticipated fight on the Taiwan Straits or in the South China Sea. These are perhaps the most serious flashpoints in the world — because if China did mobilise, the US wouldn’t be able to do much except slink away or threaten to use nukes.
 
Second: no stupid accidents. Battlefield mistakes happen with alarming frequency, and we’re due one any day. Memorably, due to a silly mix-up, Russia nearly blew up 30 RAF personnel in 2022. They would have done so had the airman’s missile not miraculously jammed in its bay. If such a fatality occurs, we will be lethally engaged with Russia.
 
Third: Donald Trump won the election. Many of Trump’s colleagues are hawks, but he has an instinct for moderation in foreign policy. It’s hard to know how important Trump himself has been to our survival these past few weeks, but his presence may have been crucial.

For instance, on December 11, Ukraine fired six US Atacms against an airbase outside the Russian city of Taganrog. Russian authorities immediately signalled that they were preparing to respond with several Oreshnik missiles — Moscow’s lightning-speed new missile system that can carry a nuclear payload.

However, the next day, Trump emphatically declared he was “vehemently opposed” to the use of Atacms, which he has characterised as “foolish.” On December 13, Russia retaliated — but without Oreshnik.
 
Fourth, the West is just a bunch of preening bullies who are fine with seeing foreigners die. It might be that people in power are a little less reckless and dumb than I feared at the beginning of 2024 … and a little more calculating and cruel.
 
Let me expand on this fourth point because it’s not just vital for understanding why we remain alive but also why we continue to threaten everybody and everything.
 
Fighting. It’s a great way to feel tough. To gain popularity. To serve your corporate masters. Joe Biden explicitly thinks having a scrap is a good thing to do — remember those weird stories about Corn Pop and his threat to beat up Trump behind the bike sheds?
 
In practice, though, Biden has remained conscious not to provoke Russian or Iranian retaliation. For instance, the White House leaked Ukrainian President Zelensky’s request for the most sophisticated Tomahawk missile systems, thereby implicitly ridiculing the idea.

Similarly, although Western powers approved the use of long-range missiles and F-16s in the closing months of 2024, their usage has, like the long-range missiles, been quite limited, intercepted — and, as noted above, opposed by the president-elect.
 
It’s gross and intriguing to see as the Ukraine war has waned in popularity, its tub thumpers shifted. “Uncensored” host Piers Morgan shifted his bellicose rhetoric the other day to say that “it’s all very well to be idealistic but … ” Remarkably, it took just a few words of “never surrender” from General Wesley Clarke, and Morgan was back to his usual nonsense. But his uncompromising line had broken for the first time on screen.
 
More sophisticated is Niall Ferguson, the right-wing historian. In his latest debate, Ferguson says we should have had a negotiated peace with Russia back in 2022. Absolutely, Niall! Couldn’t agree more, Niall!

But look how he frames this — he says Biden made “numerous blunders” because he believed “it was in America’s interests to see the war prolonged.” Hmm, well, firstly, why would you defend a president who’s so vile as to think that deliberately prolonging a war would be the right thing to do? And note — not in Ukrainians’ interests; in the US’s interests.
 
Quite beyond this, though, for Ferguson to think the US follows its “national interest” is kind of … babyish. In the debate, the author of Provoked, Scott Horton, points to public choice theory, which assumes that countries operate on behalf of their constituent interests, not for abstract reasons of benevolent patriotism. Frankly, if you don’t understand that’s the standard way things work, you're living in a fairy tale like these other twerps.
 
So, when Ferguson says the West has disastrously armed Ukraine just enough not to lose but not enough to win, he’s dead right. He thinks this is a tragic error or weakness.

In reality, we know it is a deliberate, cynical imperial policy. The war was always designed to “weaken Russia” and kill their soldiers, while there was never any intention to give Ukraine the security guarantees it keeps begging for.

Casualty figures have been twisted in numerous sneaky ways, notably by officials only ever releasing confusing and partial stats (“military casualties,” “civilian deaths,” etc), but from what I can tell, there are well over a million casualties in each theatre of conflict, with each death toll in the hundreds of thousands. I made the case earlier this year that Gaza will ultimately be in the top five worst genocides of modern times.
 
So, there is ultimately some consensus between pro and anti-war positions. But the difference between anti-war types like me and people like Biden, Ferguson, and Morgan is that we anticipate what will happen based on the best evidence and expert testimony, whereas they strike a macho posture for as long as possible based on what they think they can get away with.
 
So brave. So very, very brave.
 
Well, I may have lost my bet, but Biden still has a few weeks to wreck everything. And then we have Trump. My betting days are done for now — but 2025 could well be the year!